Soul Seeker : Rise of the Lycans
by holdyourpeace
Summary: Viktor's twins, the audacious Solan and his similarly obstinate sister Sonja, are yet unaware of the mark they will leave upon the adverse clans of vampire and lycan. Lucian finds an illicit lover in his sovereign's son. Epic/Slash. In progress. Review!
1. PROEM

PROEM

She was roused from sleep by the sudden, shocking depth of her dreams.

She hadn't been sleeping well for some time. Her thoughts in slumber had been increasingly disturbed of late, growing worse for the strange, intemperate distortions she still felt being worked on the fibers of her very being. Product of a decision she could not bring herself to regret, though she wished terribly that she could.

He was aware that she had risen, but he didn't so much as reach out for her this time, knowing well that she would have recoiled as she always did after the dreams. He had learned to leave her to herself for a bit before moving to comfort her or pull her back down onto the bed with him.

She looked briefly at him, his face caught in the glow of early morning coming in through the curtains in the window that weren't pulled completely shut. Such a beautiful face, and she was becoming more appreciative of his constant presence where once she hadn't found the company of any male creature who wasn't a comrade in arms to be bearable for too long.

Well, there had been an exception before him, as there usually was in such deductions, but Michael had been a comrade in arms to her as well, and far more faithful, it had been revealed, than the other. So little time had passed and she knew already that she would have chosen him to this day over any other. That had been made clear to the both of them when she slew Viktor, the only other male presence who, in her two-hundred years of wretchedly misspent immortal life, she had ever shown anything but a casual indifference to.

That wasn't counting Kraven, who had pushed her to open hostility countless times, even before she learned of his betrayal.

What she felt for Michael, however, as she watched him there, not sleeping anymore now that she had awoken - he was attuned emphatically to her and felt it strongly when she herself felt unrest - but not fully awake as she was, with his eyes still shut, was far from what she had felt for Viktor, the man who had been called her Dark Father. Her admiration for Viktor's ferocity in battle and his cunning in the arena of politics could not be compared to her love for Michael, and she did indeed feel love for him.

She didn't know now if she could continue to call what she had felt for Viktor love, simply because the idea that she had once loved him caused her nothing but a heated, unparalleled rancor. How things change.

She was going. She'd known upon waking that she wouldn't remain here in the bed, and Michael knew this, too. He accepted wordlessly that she would return to him when her mind was settled.

She kissed him quickly, a bold thing for her. She had gone so long bereft of sentiment, driven to live only for the archaic ritual of the hunt that she had come to accept as her only purpose in this deathless coil. But she'd wanted to kiss him on the lips before going, as she inevitably did on these early mornings, to the library of this house, where she sat in silence for hours at a time with the ancient books that were so numerous there she could have lived another hundred years and never read every word within them all, and so she did, loving the contact between them, for it was as new and intimate a feeling still as their nightly lovemaking, which was always resplendent with all the passion and tenderness of newlyweds.

He kissed her back softly and whispered something to her, some sweet little words that equated invariably to the message of "I love you." She repeated them to him in all sincereness, comfortably earnest with him to stunning extents, and rose from the bed.

She'd thrown her black silk slip over the back of the chair at the desk beside the bed, and she retrieved this garment now and pulled it down over her head, matching it with a pair of shorts made of industrial satin. The cloth was cool and smooth against her skin, salutary after the jarring awakening had left her heated.

She left her feet bare and padded across the room to the door. The stone walls were kind with noise, absorbing all sounds the way modern plaster could not, so when the door creaked on antiquated hinges upon opening she knew it would not upset Michael, who was undoubtedly already settling back into sleep.

Navigating the halls outside with a grudging familiarity, she passed room after room, not bothering to turn her head to look inside, for she knew not a single one was occupied but for the one she shared with Michael at the very end of the last passage in the highest story.

Andreas Tanis was gone from this place. They'd found his body upon returning, haggard and drained of all life by who else but Markus, who had come here maybe a mere hour after they left the lair of the Historian the first time to pursue Corvinus. In a show of reverence she did not know herself capable of, Selene had dutifully burned the remains in an oven of coals and cast the ashes to the north-blowing winds.

It was, perhaps, a gesture of requital for what Viktor had inflicted upon Tanis for the irrevocable crime of speaking the truth so long ago, though what truth this was she was unsure of still. There were so many missing pieces to the whole of the events.

It was doubtful to her that Tanis had perpetrated his violation for anything outside of his own immoderate self-interests, but still she'd felt a need to provide some sort of indemnity for yet another of her ignominious maker's atrocities shrouded in lies.

It had been she who Viktor had chosen to bring Tanis here in iron chains, and she had done so without questioning, never heeding then the Historian's warnings to her about the true nature of the Elder's secrets, most especially not his hinting at Viktor's hand in the death of her family. She'd been so willing to believe only untruths in her callous youth, caring only for Viktor's approval of her every action.

Like a good daughter. And what had become of Viktor's other children? Were they not both gone now, by his order, no less? Damn him that he had left such a legacy to tax those who followed him. She had committed horrors in his name.

And to think that Michael had been so quick to forgive that. He was a marvel to her. It seemed he might be her own redemption, for he never saw in her the killer of hundreds that she was, an instigator of genocide.

But she didn't want to think of that now. She had chosen to be better than he who gave her eternal life, the great speaker of deceptions, and that was enough for now. The guilt had haunted her enough in her dreams. The very fact that she no longer knew what she was was retribution enough.

The Corvinus Strain had yet to finish changing her, yet it had been weeks since she'd taken the blood of its progenitor into herself. She could feel it seething within her on a cellular level even as she descended the twisting staircase that would take her down to the ground level of the monastery.

The blood of Corvinus within her, given willingly in a moment of desperation, and the seed of a son of Corvinus in her womb, an accidental and unexpected flowering of life inside her.

She could not deny to herself that she feared what this child might be.

She was still fearful of herself, as well. The struggle with Markus had shown her only the scant beginnings of her new power, something she couldn't presume to know the limits of. That she could walk in daylight had been a disquieting miracle.

She had expected on that first morning to be destroyed in the light, and her sins with her, a ready hecatomb. Instead she had found herself transformed into something beyond even Michael's incredible scope of preternatural strength. She wasn't sure if she did indeed have limits anymore.

She became afraid often that she would become like him, like the despot Elder who had been the first of her kind, for she did share his direct bloodline now. How horrifying it would be, to undergo such a metamorphosis, into a true monster of the night as he had been. Her heart grew heavy for Michael when she thought of this, Michael who was cursed with a bestial form that he only ever assumed with a pang in his soul.

Michael. His firstborn child would be born to outlaws, parents who were pariahs even among their unnatural kind. God, and this little one that was ever growing in the folds of her protective vampiric flesh would be the first of its kind, a hybrid birth.

Already she dreaded for her child's life and she had only just discovered that she was pregnant days ago. Already she was fiercely vigilant of the threat that she knew would come.

Let them come, whoever they might be. Let either family come, whatever vampires remained in the New World coven or however many lycan vagrants would see that she couldn't live to bear. If it came to a clash once again then she would strike down any who would do this child harm with devastating force, and Michael would do no less. He was elated to be a father.

And would she make a mother of herself when the time came? It didn't seem possible, but lo, she had an example to follow. Or rather to oppose. She had only to be everything Viktor had been to her, though she would never drive this child to violence, to vengeance, to lead a life of ceaseless retribution. She would never lie to this child.

There had always been love in Viktor's actions. She couldn't refute that, but in the end it hadn't been enough to outweigh all else.

There would never be anything else but love for this child. She would make sure of that.

She found the library on the bottom floor in the hallway adjacent to the main foyer, behind a pair of august French doors wherein the glass panes were intercut with an elegant gridwork of leafy filigree.

The handle gave with a click when she pulled down on it and she pushed the doors open with both hands and entered the vast room within, closing them gently behind her.

This dwarfed the library in Ordoghaz, which had been burned to cinders in Markus's rampage in the Old World coven house. The shelves of fine polished dark beechwood stood as tall as the cathedral ceilings, covering every wall, corner to corner, right to the very edge of the doors.

Tanis had kept his records flawlessly intact here, no less than a complete paper database, dating back through the last millennia, of vampire historical documents. It was all marked by date and a dozen other categorizing features and ranked and organized down to the last letter in a system only he understood. Selene had taken days on end just trying to decipher how he had catalogued his life's work.

He'd taken some time before his demise to begin translating some of the texts into modern English and scribing them into leatherbound books. The vast majority of them were written in the old tongue, which was still spoken by many in this country but bothersome for any vampire who had acclimated in the last century to speaking and reading the now practically universal language of the Western world. Tanis himself was, naturally, well-versed in many archaic tongues, but even he must have known that he would not live forever, and that his legacy of records had to be passed into the hands of some younger immortal to guard for whatever remained of eternity. It would do no good to let these words disappear with a dying script.

Only one wall in the library housed any number of books. The rest of it was still in scroll form, stored in deftly carved hollows in the shelves and written in faded ink on yellowed parchment that would crumble under the touch. And the translator was less than dust now. So perhaps some history would be lost to the blood hunter clan. As if any of them remaining knew anything of their true history to begin with.

Selene had laid aside, a few days before, a certain tome that had caught her interest while perusing the shelves.

It was one of the newly translated pieces. She could still smell the fresh ink on smooth synthetic paper when she picked it up gingerly from the splintered desk where she'd left it. Paper cut by machines and fixed with factory-brewed adhesives that would last forever into a spine and binding made to look purposely worn by time, though they were as fresh and new as the pages themselves; it was a mystery to her why Tanis hadn't chosen something as simple as a spiral notebook to do this in, or even a computer file. But as a student of history, he'd always had a flair for dramatic ostentation, and the story within this volume really did call for more of an impressive housing.

It was copied with a ballpoint pen with infinite wells of black ink. He could have written an entire book with just one of those invincible metal pens when before he'd had to keep huge stores of bottled India ink on hand and constantly replace his fragile goosefeather quills. At least he was slightly practical about his obsessions.

She sat in one of the comfy cushioned chairs dispersed in odd places all around the room, choosing one in a quiet corner and opening the book in her lap.

This was a story she had heard twice before, once from one who'd actually left memories in these very pages. She knew the names of the characters buried in these words - some of them she'd known in living, some of them she had loved - and as she read she saw them in the space behind her eyes, feeling for herself what they must have felt as this saga unfolded around them.

Viktor's progeny, Solan and Sonja, the twins, one verboten lover to Lucian, who would become the greatest werewolf lord history would never remember, and his sister a celebrated warrior in vampire lore; all were dead or lost to the times, and one by his father's ruling. She hadn't even known Viktor had a son until Lucian told her so himself.

This was a love story. Tanis had written it in his own separated, abstract style, fitting of a Historian, but she could not be blinded to what was really there. There was war, yes, and tragedy in abundance, but in the end there was love to compel every motion. She imagined she heard the words spoken aloud between the impassioned youths who were at the center of it all.

Ah, Viktor, how you buried this tale, your most personal shame and your deepest grief. Here was the root of the war, and it could all be laid at your feet. If you were ever anything more than a monster it could be discerned here in these words.

Selene forgot herself and time as she turned the pages. She settled back in the chair and read on.


	2. INCITEMENT

INCITEMENT : LUCIAN

I encountered him for the first time at the age of seventeen.

Cheiros Keep was a lofty, eldritch place then, a castle built into the side of a great craggy black mountain with a high wall all around it. The shadow it cast across the barren field of boulders that stretched before it to the periphery of the great cypress forest was an imposing expanse, to say the least of it. When the silvery half moon rose behind it in the lurid nucleus of night, the silhouette created against the austere celestial facade was as something plucked from an esoteric dream, a monstrosity of somber obelisks clawing for the sky.

The masters of this house presided over their grand dominion from the highest towers, where their feet need never be sullied by the impure earth trod upon by all others beneath them who made their home here.

I was born in the dregs.

I do not remember explicitly the environment in which I came into life, only that the ceilings had been dark and dripping, and that my mother had hovered over me as I writhed on the cold stone upon which she had expelled her burden of months in one heaving gush. The blood had coated me as closely as my own skin.

My first gulp of air upon escape from the confinement of the womb was foul with the stench of putrescence on my mother's breath. The floor beneath me was rough and cold, a piercing torture to my raw newborn skin.

I never knew her name, the one who'd unfathomably given me life. It was told to me in years beyond this mundanely transcendental moment that she'd been shot through with a silver bolt in her heart as she hunched over me on the stones.

It could be reasoned that she no longer had a name she recognized on that night, that she would not have turned her head if someone were to call it. There is truth in this, and I cannot help but think that there had been hunger in my mother's eyes as she stared down at the freakish pink creature that had just come forth from her unpracticed loins.

A lycan birth in captivity is a rare thing. She had been in labor when she was hauled down to the pens in a steel net, and had her oblivious captors known this the arrow that had stilled her breathing would have been directed sooner at the all but unnoticeable distention in her belly that was me, pushing towards freedom in the close channel of the birth canal.

She had been a beast, my mother. Perhaps in some distant past she had been a comely mortal woman, or maybe she had been born into beastliness, as so many were in those times of the infectious older breed. The latter wasn't unlikely, for in their rampant lives the wolves could rut in the open and with one after the other, in meadows and shaded groves or wherever they desired, producing as many prurient animals in this way as they did with their virulent bite.

I know only this, that she was dead before she could recover from the shock of the birth, and that I might have followed her soon after.

This never happened. I should have been smeared against the floor underfoot, but it never happened.

I was ordered scooped up from the filthy afterbirth and cleaned. Like one of their own children, though they held me by one leg, as if I were a diseased thing, beneath the buckets of icy water they dumped over me as I screamed and screamed. Cold was unforgiveable to me in such a fragile state. They didn't care. I'm sure those who tended to me hoped I would die right then, drowned or simply killed by the stupor of such harsh handling.

But I did not die. Things passed as a blur soon after.

It wasn't for some time that I came to understand why I was spared when in any other circumstance my brains would have been dashed. I grew up under the wing of the current ruler of the Chain, Viktor, who was always more an imperious autocrat to me than the father he sometimes likened to.

The story is well known. It can be told in short summation.

I was born in human form to a lycan mother, and for this Viktor saw fit to raise me in higher regard than any other of the mindless lycans he kept as near-uncontrollable guards of his crypt in daylight. He saw potential in me and my inherent ability to facilitate the aberrant transformation, which no other of my kind before me had been capable of. No lycan before me had ever known human shape again after the fatal bite.

From my stock he created more like me, forcing the passing of my extraction of the infection through cruel tactics from one human specimen to another. Those who would not make others were starved until the coming of the full moon, when the change was brought on immutably by some wicked whim of nature itself, and locked into their pens with quivering human victims.

It was in this way that I took my first bite and created my first brother, still too young then to realize just what kind of hell this was.

I was never loyal to Viktor in the ways he assumed. Due to his favor, however, I received more liveable quarters than the poor wretches in the slave pens and, to some degree, a certain amount of comfort in life. He saw something in me that he wished to nurture. It seemed it was in Viktor's nature to seek out great prowess and discipline it past latency. It was the mark of a good leader, and there was never any doubt that that was what he was.

My slight elevation from mere slave status amounted to almost nothing, however, in the shadow of the decadence of the vampire elite. In truth, I was given a backbreaking post as a blacksmith's apprentice to a hateful old smith who liked to press his irons into the skin of my arms just to hear me cry out and laugh as the burns healed over themselves. I ate the same scraps given to my brothers who lived below, black bread and old nags' bones. I drank the same tepid rainwater. I even wore the same heavy iron yoke around my neck, the inner edge of it fitted with the haphazard spikes that pointed in towards my throat to threaten against defying my keepers through transformation, and because of this I was only ever the obedient waif in Viktor's direct presence.

In truth I cannot remember a time in my earliest youth when I was anything but uncaring for him. Even then I knew hidden resentments for him and his, the drinkers of blood who imprisoned my kind as subservient chattel. I suppose steady upheaval was engrained within me from the beginning. Amazing, the clarity behind the sense of right and wrong we all possess in childhood. Even more amazing still how easily it is corrupted, but that comes much later.

But that's enough of the same old apologue. For the moment, we return me to the age of seventeen, naked, collared and fighting for my life.

There were seven of them in the pit with me, big lycans with murder etched into their eyes.

The burns in their sides inflicted by vampires' hot metal brands made them hate me as if I was the one who had caused them their undue misery. Their unyielding, vengeful stares bore into me as the referees behind them slashed at their backs with the vicious bullwhips which tore skin and fur from their bones, goading them forward with brutish yells.

They were maddened by the pain, rangy and frothing at the corners of their mouths. These were lycans tempered for the coliseum.

They had spent days below in the brig, being pummeled to near death by the slave master and his boorish followers, unable to lash out though their suffering had been beyond reprehensible. They could always be heard roaring in bloodcurdling agony from the secure rooms where they were kept apart from the laborers, moved to eventual madness by injury and loneliness. I could see the scars across their curled muzzles that still had yet to fully heal even with the abet of lycan venom, the teeth broken and missing from their swollen maws that were caked with old blood.

These poor creatures had once been able to resume human form. They had been of my ilk, not like the unthinking wild wolves who roamed the countryside outside the walls of the keep.

That ability to revert was no longer with them. They were men turned monstrous, not through their own arcane biology but through the sheer barbarism inflicted on them. Even if they had not been in wolf form at this moment, they would have been no less savage.

The tendons in their necks had been cut with silver razors to prevent them from turning on their handlers. The muscles took far longer to restore themselves when subjected to a wound from a weapon cast of pure silver, our most potent poison. They could only point their jaws ahead.

And now they had me to point their malice at, as well. I was their torturer incarnate simply because I was a living being set before them.

There was no semblance of reason within them anymore. They would kill me gladly because they thought killing would end their pain. All things were indistinguishable to them.

I wanted them to come at me quickly. I thought I might begin to weep for them if I wasn't soon made to brawl with these creatures in defense of my life. Oh, my brothers, you who might have been my friends, how you have been tormented, to undergo this unreal subversion.

How I abhorred our keepers then.

Above us, sitting beneath the high vaulted ceiling of the coliseum, were those who watched these loathsome proceedings as if they were sport. Vampire who called themselves nobles, dozens of sallow faces churlish in their glee at the crooked odds of the game. I didn't debase myself further to look up and meet their stares, for I knew every eye was trained down on me, the lycan adolescent stripped and thrown into the fray with half a dozen of my own kin.

They expected to watch me rent to pieces. Still, it seemed the highest degradation came in the fact that they had taken my clothes. I was mortified to be exposed so, and I hunched low where I stood to afford myself some form of crude dignity in hiding my nakedness in shadow. But it was not my first time in the coliseum, and so they knew my intent in this and laughed amongst themselves. See how their pet presumed to imitate shame!

I braced my heels into the dust of the pit and waited for the initial stroke. The mad lycans pulled their ragged breaths in and snarled, the drool gathering below their open mouths.

I couldn't catch which one initiated the charge. But one of them did break the menacing lull at last and created an onset to the furor that followed.

They were upon me in a stir, their ferocity immeasurable from the first lunge. I was deafened by the thunder of cheers from the crowd watching and the bellows of my assailants in my ears. All thought me dead already.

I threw both arms out before me to meet the assault. With elbows locked to absorb the tremendous impact, I caught two of the attacking lycans by the throat, unable to close my fingers around the solid width of their necks but still holding tight to them, keeping the jaws that snapped with a sound like gnashing steel at bay. In their frustration, they groped for my gut with their claws, and I had to arch my back to prevent being eviscerated.

They were far larger than I, younger than I was in immortal years simply because of the fact that it had been my blood that changed them, but nonetheless deadly in these numbers. Or so they would have been, had they been fighting with any sense of tact.

I tossed these two that I'd debilitated against their companions in a show of strength that caused the enamored audience to gasp collectively. This scattered them, battering and confusing them in their haste to slaughter this strange being, so much smaller than them and as a result, seemingly so much weaker. They should have been sucking the marrow from my bones already.

It was enough of an abeyance for me to make my crucial maneuvers. I'd already devised the measure of my survival before a single one of them could shake the daze from their heads. This would have to be done quickly.

I moved between them with the greatest speed I could muster. The first of my foes never saw nor heard me approach him from behind, nor did he feel anything but the crack of the stone wall of the pit against his skull for a fraction of a moment before receding into unconsciousness. The body slumped, still breathing shallowly, at my feet.

The second met a similar fate, and the third rushed me as I stepped back to avoid the falling lycan tumbling over onto me. This one suffered the direct brunt of my fist, crashing down onto the crown of his head with devastating efficacy. I felt the bone crack beneath my knuckles, though, as with the others, the blow was not fatal.

The fourth and fifth came together, from separate angles, and fell under a fine sweeping slam from the heel of my foot that caught both in the same swing. Their jaws broke as if they were made of sticks and I was jolted by a twinge of guilt as they crumpled. The blood trickled from their mouths.

They would heal, but I hadn't checked my pith. I needn't have been so forceful with them.

Two more remained. The crowd overhead was all but riotous. They were cheering and stomping their feet, calling for more lycans to be loosed into the pit.

The lingering opposition was put down with ease.

I hung my head and waited over their prone shapes for the gates in the far wall to open, ushering me from this sickening place. It had all passed within a term of seconds.

Some time passed, and no gate rose. The audience was unceasing, a cacophony.

And then all fell silent.

I dared to train my eyes up toward the spectator box that hung over the rows of seats spanning in a wide circle around the pit. I knew that this sudden hush could only mean that this box, which had remained unused but for once before, the first time that I'd been shunted out into the light of the torches on the rim of the barrier, was now occupied.

Standing tall there in all his haughty finery, his hair oiled and flat on his scalp and his coat of green velvet glittering with the trinkets sewn into the high collar, was the lord of this house. His eyes blazed with the truest tinge of blue, drawn and perfunctory as ever, and his gravely lined face seemed the whitest of all those in attendance, his pallidity indicative of his monumentally longer years.

Sting of choler in my heart. There stood Viktor, his chin turned up as it always was.

His voice cut through the quiet like a scythe, a mingling of gravel and silk. It was the low of a predatory cat, exacting and high-handed as he himself was.

"What do you think, Sonja?"

The girl at his side was like a doll in her prettiness, her cheeks full, though wan, the lack of color typical of a vampire child. Her large eyes were black as slate, though not unkind for one of her age, and her long hair was just as dark. She was wearing some pretty garment that needed no second consideration, a dress for a little girl.

This was Viktor's daughter, then. She wasn't so much a child now as she was burgeoning.

I searched for the other that I knew must also be there. There had been a son, as well. They were twins, the offspring of the Elder.

He was standing a little apart from his father and sister, resting his chin in his palm with his fingers curled across a fair, angular face towards his eye.

I couldn't read the expression he maintained without so much as blinking. He was looking directly at me, and this caused me incredible discomfort. I shifted where I stood, remembering my rude state of undress.

Was that fascination or disdain in his eyes? They were so much like his sister's, though perhaps a little more tapered at the inside corners and only slightly closer together. No, they were also just the most modestly lighter shade than hers. True grey, like storm clouds.

His nose was narrow and shapely, the mouth below it smaller than his sister's and anointed with thin, striking lips, which were darker, it appeared, than a drinker of blood's should be. His mouth was a genteel quality, delicate in design but set in a curious, provocative pout. His clothes were simple, a loose linen shirt and slim dark trousers, quite unlike the regalia boasted by his father.

And his hair. His hair was like sunlight, pure spun gold that danced in hypnotic waves about the nape of his long neck. He let it hang savagely over his face as I was obliged to do with my own rather than slick it back as he should have.

"I don't think much at all of this," answered the girl, looking between me and her father. Her tone was not baleful towards me, simply bored. Viktor nodded as if he was accustomed to this indifference.

"And you, Solan? Have you any of your dexterous words for us tonight?"

I focused my gaze upon the boy. He and his sibling were not younger than me by many years. I was inexplicably captivated with him, with how boldly separated he was from his courtly father and how it seemed he might be just as equally captivated with me.

His stare met my eyes. There was a different kind of consciousness there, in this fixed look. His eyes had more luster to them than any I had yet encountered, though this luster was not in the form of tangible light.

For several excruciating minutes after Viktor's inquisition, the boy continued to study me closely, turning his mouth up on one side. Viktor and the girl were speechless throughout. Say something! Lift the iron curtain, one of you, or take your eyes off me and let me leave this place! Did they truly expect him to speak, that they waited?

All of a sudden, his mouth widened into a smile. A strangely radiant spectacle. Viktor was visibly taken aback.

The boy spoke.

"Nothing so eloquent as what you predicate, father." His voice was young, denotive of a depth of frequency that might come later in early adulthood, and came almost as a supple purr, his words smooth and effortless. He tarried on the word Father, as if he meant something else with it entirely. "Just that he is tremendously fun."

I flinched.

What did he mean by that? That he enjoyed watching me down here, scrapping like a dog?

"Oh, take no offense to it," he said. I didn't realize at first that he was now addressing me directly, still smiling. I was bewildered by it. Viktor turned towards his son then in a snap, tossing a warning expression at him. I could see he regretted already asking his son his opinion. Every vampire in the coliseum was mesmerized or outraged or both at what they were witnessing. Well, save for the girl Sonja, who was stifling giggles into her hands. The boy went on anyway. "I don't mean that you entertain me with this fatuous brutality."

"Solan, that is quite-"

He cut off his father expertly. "I only mean that you yourself seem like tremendous fun. I wish we could have conversations. Your name is Lucian, yes?"

I might have been mortified. He really was speaking to me. And they would not think to spare me the whip below for the indiscretion I had committed in catching the attention of Viktor's son.

Nevertheless, I was inconceivably intrigued. But I did not answer him. I couldn't.

"You are afraid to acknowledge me?"

"That," Viktor spat, barely controlling his eruption, for I could see the veins rising, pronounced, in his temple, "My son, is because he is forbidden to answer, forbidden to speak to those who hold lordship over him. That includes you, Solan, and you need never ask for acknowledgment from a slave."

"That's so endlessly boring, father. I think I'll take a more contiguous approach to provoking words from him."

"Solan, n-"

Viktor called out too late, and if he had been timely with his censure I am sure that the boy Solan would still have leapt bodily over the barrier and into the pit with me. I heard his sister squeal in astonishment.

He landed nimbly before me and straightened, looking about with inculpable interest at the lycan bodies strewn around us before facing me.

"I've never been this close to one. And they're all still alive, aren't they? They're all breathing still."

I retained my reticence.

"You didn't kill a single one. Come on and tell me why this is so. I have an idea, but I'd like to hear it from you. I'd like to hear your voice."

Nothing from me, though I couldn't take my eyes off him. Just as he was fascinated with the proximity of the lycans he was so naively impressed by, so I was mutely fascinated with his closeness to me. He was astounding to look at. His expressions were astounding, as were his daring words.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm speaking as if you aren't one yourself. I think it's rather cruel that they would put you in here with that collar on. Though, it seems you were quite masterful without the need to transform, doesn't it?"

His brow arched then for a moment, as if a wonderful notion had just come to him.

"I wonder if you are quite so masterful against a different opponent?"

I didn't understand for a moment.

And then he struck me with a spinning kick that had been so quick I could barely raise my arms in time to protect my face. The wallop rattled me.

"Excellent!" he crowed, delighted. He spun again and this time brought his leg down on my shoulder, a concise, concentrated blow. I had to bite my tongue till I drew blood not to cry out.

"Oh, don't mind the bloody rules, hit me back! I know you want to!"

He began jabbing at me playfully with open fists. It was all I could do to ward off the quick strokes without doing the unthinkable and striking back.

I could have brought him down. He was fast and clearly already being taught in the ways of combat by his father or perhaps even a Death Dealer, but he would have been far from able to harm me should I have chosen to do more than simply stand my ground, though I'm sure he believed he could best me if I raised a hand against him.

"I just want to foment something within you," he insisted. "Come on, I just saw you very severely bruise several of your own people. Say something to me or hit me so I know you're alive!"

A fluttering of heavy cloth and a vast shape appearing between us interrupted the boy's unbelievable rhetoric. I took a step back, fearing a clout from an iron fist.

But Viktor was turned towards his son in the pit. I could feel his lividness burning against us both though I couldn't see his face.

"As I was saying, my dauntless, gutty son..."

His voice was lowered to a dangerous hiss, and I knew Viktor meant only for his son and I to hear what he was saying.

"...That is quite enough."

"Father, I was only try-"

"I know, Solan, what you were trying to achieve, and I will promise you now that nothing could come of it," Viktor assured. "You would attempt to exchange discourse with a slave, you, my devourer of books and poetry? You, my brilliant and boundless son?"

"That I am brilliant and boundless is exactly why I would do this," answered the boy, smirking up at his father, an impish grin that almost made me smile myself.

Momentary reserve, as if Viktor was building towards an explosion. But he did not combust.

He did something then that shocked me beyond belief, something I could claim truthfully to have never heard from him.

He laughed. I couldn't imagine how it must have looked to see him smile in laughter.

"Ah, and I've forgotten insolent," he mused. "Only another aspect of your youthful genius."

He went forward and embraced his son. The boy accepted the gesture, though, it seemed, reluctantly.

"You are a prince among your kind, Solan. But I did not bring you and your sister here today so you could take pleasure in these bourgeois distractions. You are to comprehend that those who seek their indulgence in this banal sport are beneath you, as are those who are a part of it."

Now Viktor turned to face me. He adopted a frigid mien to say to me what little he had to say.

"You are wise to check your hand and wiser to curb your tongue, Lucian." He addressed his son once more in my presence. "You will not do this again, Solan. You will never bear words to a slave again."

And then he took his son by the back of his shirt. Solan looked at me, saddened, a sight that stirred me, and mouthed the word "Goodbye" before Viktor was off with him.

XXXXX

I thought I would not see the intrepid vampire boy who had challenged me illicitly in the coliseum again. But it was only later that night that I was to encounter him for the second time.

In my quarters in the smithy, I had a window set with metal bars the width of my arms. The door was not locked as it only led out into the courtyard of the keep, but this window, built into the outer wall surrounding the castle itself and looking out through it, was well fortified. I could not have so much as chewed through it with a lycan's teeth.

It was through this window that I saw Viktor's son again.

At dawn's breaking, just as the sun was beginning to climb on the far horizon, I heard the huff of a bridled horse and the tap of hooves emerging from the stables. No vampire should have been roused at such a time, and certainly not outside the walls.

I rushed to the window to see the black mare retreating towards the cypress forest with a cloaked rider. In my haste I knocked a table over, and the rider whirled at the sound.

The hood of the dusty leather cloak shifted in the movement just long enough for me to see beneath it a mass of lustrous blond hair.

When he saw who it was who was watching him, it seemed he was at odds at whether to continue on or drive the mare back towards the wall. He was already well out into the field. He considered, stationary for a short time.

He then tossed up his hood just enough for me to see his face. Smiling again.

I smiled, too.

He lifted a hand and beckoned me mischievously. But he knew I could not come! I was here, trapped here behind this wall, behind these iron ribs that I clung to now, wishing I had the strength to bend them or break them. I could only look dejectedly out at the openness he enjoyed. Did he really have the courage to go out in the day like that?

He did.

He appeared hesitant to turn away, but he did. He pulled his cloak back down, spurred his mare softly and rode into the sunrise.


End file.
